Culture Icons

[TelTura]

Alright, so I've gone and rendered higher-clarity versions of all the culture icons.  They are a few pixels larger than the ones we currently have, but I think it helps improve the clarity overall pretty well.  Some only improved marginally (Gandalf, Isengard), but I think that's outweighed by the improvement in others (Raider, Rohan).  The ugly yellow tint is gone as well. 

I've uploaded a *.zip of the new icons here, and the original vector *.svg's here, if anyone wanted a particular resolution rendered. 



Comparison for the lazy:


 


 
 




 


[no original]

[Kralik]

Hmmm... we are going to need a smaller version of each. I've noticed already that the originals break the text flow a bit (they are somewhat superscripted) and I was hoping to fix that.

[TelTura]

What needs to happen is the leading needs to be taken into account.  I got these vectors by extracting them from the fonts in the rulebook *.pdf's, and they're almost always vertically lead downwards, lining up more with the descender than with the baseline.  As you've pointed out, the problem exists already with the current icons (which are a smidge smaller than the actual icons used on the cards already), and so I think shrinking the *.png's is not the solution.  Either inlined images need to somehow be descended some pixels on each line, or perhaps we should just increase the spacing of all lines.  In fact, I think that's going to be the only practical solution (unless there's some css wizardry I'm unaware of).

[Kralik]

There are ways to take case of the spacing, possibly with CSS. But what I meant was that I'd rather have them more-or-less text sized and "superscript" than 1.5-2x text-sized and "superscript" (forgive me for not knowing the technical term).

[Kralik]

Example: Fierce in Despair is a nice card that discards a companion for a mere twilight.

[TelTura]

How difficult would it be to have the wiki use a custom form of the Arial font it's using now?  That will eliminate all spacing issues right there without messing with the code, not to mention allow scaling much better than it does now.  We'd just have to decide which characters to use that the [Culture] tags would be directing to.  I don't know how reliable it is to require a browser to use a font provided by a website.

[Kralik]

It isn't. Browsers will only use fonts they have on their system. Otherwise, they will default to the fonts they have available.

[TelTura]

That's retarded.  The more I learn about the way the Web is built, the more I .

Well, I guess I'll get smaller versions, then.  Do we want same size as the current icons, or do you want me to figure out what size we need to get it to line up with the original card proportions?

[Kralik]

They don't have to be the same as the original cards or icons, but whatever size seems to work with the wiki text we have now should be fine. I don't anticipate changing the font/size of regular wiki text.

[TelTura]

Oh, another option that I don't think you've answered yet, any chance we could install *.svg vector support; then I wouldn't have to render and re-render the images...we could just tweak the size settings in the config file.

[Kralik]

Good idea. I've got to step out for a bit, but I'll look into it when I get back. Care to put the vectors file on a service that doesn't require signup?

[Kralik]

The biggest problem with this plugin is that it needs a modern browser. At this time it works best with WebKit-based browsers (Chromium, Chrome, Safari and Epiphany).

I guess that excludes IE...

I hate having to check pages to make sure they'll work on IE6. Bah.

[Kralik]

I'm experimenting with moving the icons down a bit. The line spacing is a bit off, but overall I think they look better inline with text. They don't look too great in the Culture table, however.

[Kralik]

Check out Condition for an example of how looks. I'll check on the upper spacing later.

[TelTura]

That is excellent.  Don't worry about the table, I'll hit it with some chart-fu later and get it looking better there.  


Also, why support IE 6?  It's literally over a decade old; is it that unreasonable to require IE8?  This might be a moot point as far as the vector plugin, I'm just curious.  

[EDIT:]not to mention it's actually not really used.  Less than 1% usage in the US, around 1% for most places in Europe.